


Strays

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Doctor Who (2005), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 5 Things, Comanionship, Episode: s07e05 The Angels Take Manhattan, Gen, Grief, Post-Ponds, lost souls - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 06:58:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5082097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don’t be alone, says his Amelia, and so the Doctor tries.</p>
<p>Five people the Doctor ran away with, and one person he didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strays

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to Dara for the second set of eyes. :)

_Don’t be alone_ , says Amy, but then she’d also said _goodbye_. And she has no right to tell him what to do, not after that. Not after she left him.

She _left_ him.

And he’s so tired, so _tired_ of loving someone and losing them, so tired of everything.

And he isn’t, he’s not going to, he doesn’t have to listen to her. She’s not his responsibility anymore, and he isn’t hers. She chose that, not him. _She_ left _him_.

And anyway, she’ll never know.

And he doesn’t take orders from ghosts.

_(And that hasn’t been true, has it, not for a long time.)_

_Don’t be alone_ , says his Amelia, and so the Doctor tries.

***

**_1\. Susan Pevensie_ **

He catches a flash of red and then he’s lying face down in the snow.

“Ow!” cries the Doctor, rubbing crossly at the back of his head, and Susan grins. She’s hanging from the branches of a tree, three feet directly above him, the scarlet lining of her coat catching the pale winter light, a snowball glinting like diamond from her hand.

“You,” the Doctor says, stabbing a finger towards her and _not_ pouting, thank you very much, “are a _cheater_.”

Susan’s grin turns into a smirk, slow and smug. “I,” she says, with great dignity, “never cheat, Doctor. It’s hardly my fault that my aim’s better than yours.”

The Doctor scowls. The hair on the back of his head sticks up wildly from the snow and from his rubbing, and the general effect is rather suggestive of an angry cockerel. Susan would love to point it out to him, but that would be rude. Still, the temptation is strong. She barely manages to hide her laugh behind her hand as it is.

“Cheater,” the Doctor repeats, vehement, and rummages wildly in the lining of his jacket. “You’ve done something to the snow, haven’t you? Some sort of electromagnetic disturbance, or perhaps a mild telepathic field…”

He drops to the ground, sonic screwdriver in hand and pointed accusingly at the snow. Susan takes the opportunity to nail him with a snowball on each ear.

The Doctor leaps up, sputtering. Susan leaps lightly from the tree, and her graceful landing on the balls of her feet does nothing to soothe the outraged look on his face.

Later, when Susan has finished laughing herself sick and the Doctor is done with pretending to be mortally insulted, they sit down on a carpet of pine needles and watch the last flurries of snow fall.

“Thank you,” Susan says, quietly, catching a snowflake on her tongue. “I’ve missed this. The woods, the snow. A proper winter.”

The Doctor smiles at her. Flecks of white dot his nose like freckles. “You’re welcome.”

They sit in silence for a time, watching the clouds gather and swirl, watching gusts of white swirl like cotton, like lace. The Doctor shifts, abruptly, a question framed in the sudden shrug of his shoulders.

“You never asked me,” he says, voice low and curious. “Why?”

Susan, to her credit, doesn’t play dumb, doesn’t say _asked what?_ She smiles, instead, a wan, tight smile. “Because it wouldn’t have made a particle of difference.”

“Oi,” protests the Doctor. “What part of ‘all of time and space’ didn’t you understand?” His voice tries for outraged and insulted, but his hearts aren’t quite in it, and it had better effect from around a face-full of snow, anyway.

He sighs. “We could go anywhere you like, Susan,” he says, and he’s serious, now. Sincere. “You only have to ask.”

Susan’s smile dims, going warm and fond, soft and sad. She leans toward him, back braced against his shoulder blades, and her posture is perfect, spine straight and shoulders regal.

“Not there,” she says, and there’s no self-pity in that, just the slimmest edge of sorrow. “You can’t.”

“Anywhere,” says the Doctor, and he doesn’t know why this is so important to him, to promise her this, but it is. “I mean,” he adds, and shrugs, “it could well be in another dimension, the way you describe it, but I’ve gotten really cross with tennis courts five through ten, so it’s not really an insurmountable problem, and” and the look on Susan’s face makes him stop.

She’s gone quiet, lips pulled tight, eyes hooded. Her breathing is deep, even, controlled. The Doctor realises that this is probably the closest he will come to seeing her cry.

“We went back once,” she says, slowly, softly. “All of us. I didn’t believe it at first, you know. I’d just gotten used to being home, and Lucy was the one who always – “

She takes another breath, and if it hitches on her sister’s name, the Doctor knows better than to mention it.

The snow keeps falling, and Susan sighs. “It was there,” she says, and her eyes hold stars, hold stories, hold regrets. “All of it. Our castle, our sea. Our sky. But it was – different. Overgrown. Abandoned. Crumbling.”

Her expression stays calm, controlled. Her fingers tangle in the frozen grass, twist, tighten. Susan exhales, ragged and juddering, and the Doctor reaches up to pull her head down onto his shoulder.

“We were standing in a ruin,” says Susan, and her voice floats up towards the frosted leaves. “It wasn’t a place we were looking for, you know. It was a time – our time there, and it was gone. No going back.”

“Oh, Susan,” murmurs the Doctor, and the words form taste so familiar on his tongue. He’s said them before, so many times, to a different girl in a different time with a different tragedy. _Oh, Susan_ , he thinks, and he sighs, and he knows exactly what she means.

“You can’t take me back, Doctor,” says Susan, and she straightens and twists round so she can look him in the eye. “Not where I want to go. I don’t want a wood or a castle by the sea. I want my family back, my time with them. But it’s gone.”

The last few flakes fall, white and silver and crystalline, and the clouds clear to let the sun peek through. For a minute the air lights with gold, with soft sparks and lace-like sunshine, and, in the silence, the Doctor takes Susan’s hand.

“Come,” she says, after a moment, levering herself to her feet, “don’t lets be maudlin anymore,” and the Doctor barely has time to register the break in her voice before she stuffs more snow down his collar.

***

**_2\. Steve Rogers_ **

“And it can go anywhere?” asks the Captain, blue eyes blown wide. “Anywhere at all?”

“Of course,” scoffs the Doctor. “Anywhere and everywhere, every star that ever was,” and if his voice cracks on the words, nobody mentions it.

“What about alien planets?” the Captain asks, with a twinkle in his eye. “Only, you know, I have to know if I need to bring the shield.”

He looks so dead serious for a second, all earnest boyish sincerity, then a smile blooms bright across his face. His grin is soft-edged and strained, full of joy and laughter but tight with it. Tired. It is a smile the Doctor understands.

 “They’re not all violent, aliens, you know,” says the Doctor, trying his best to look offended. “Just the invading ones. And the occasional wandering Dalek. And, well, the Silurians can get a little tetchy from time to time, but they’re not, strictly speaking, _alien_ , and you know, they _were_ here first.”

He pauses. His hands flutter back and forth over the console, pressing buttons and flicking switches. Nothing important, just little caresses. Calming. Soothing. For him as well as her.

The Captain watches, quietly, curious, no judgment. The Doctor watches him watching and wonders how long it will take before he is able to fly her.

“Anyway,” the Doctor says, “there are nice ones! Aliens. We can visit them, you know. Any of them. All of them. All of time and space.”

He looks up, tries for a winning smile. It flickers fast, but he’ll give it an A-plus for effort, anyway. “What do you say?”

The Captain drops his gaze, bites his lip. Hums, a little bit. Hesitates.

“Could you,” he asks, hushed and hopeful, “could you – could you, maybe, could you take me home?”

The silence that stretches between them is painful. The Doctor does his best to look like he’s considering it, to look busy, to look away.

“I,” says the Doctor, finally, and swallows. “I’m sorry,” he says, because he cannot bring himself to say _no_.

“It’s alright,” says the Captain, and the hitch in his voice is so quiet it makes the Doctor want to cry. “I understand. There are – rules, about these things.”

His gaze drops further, down to the floor, but the grin doesn’t disappear. It fades, instead, slides into a soft half-smile, wry and hurt and full of painful humour. For a minute, there’s a hush; for a minute it’s like looking into a mirror.

“Do you ever,”  the Captain says, his voice cracked and breaking the silence, “do you ever get tired of it? Being a Doctor?”

 The Doctor freezes. His hands still, hovering inert above a lever, a candy-coloured swath of buttons, and he folds them together so he won’t have to watch them shake.

“Why would I?” he asks, cool and casual and like he’d never even considered it, and he nearly chokes on the lie.

The Captain looks up, blue eyes searching, and as they meet the Doctor’s they go from the blue of the sky to the blue of the sea, deep and open and unfulfilled.

“Because,” he says, “Doctors and Captains – we have rules, and orders. And sometimes it just gets – I mean,” and he shrugs, wry and helpless. “I mean, it’s an honour, you know, but it’s, it’s tiring. And you don’t ever get a break. You’re the Doctor, all the time.”

He tilts his head, just slightly.“I guess I just thought it might make you tired.”

The Doctor strokes a panel, slow and silent, and the tingle in his fingers is the hum of his girl or is a tremor or is a break, and he cannot, he cannot tell.

“Yeah,” says the Doctor, after a long moment, “it does,” and shuts his eyes, tight.

When he opens them, he is already moving, whisking around the console, shoes skidding on the slick glass floor. His fingers skip about, inputting coordinates as he dances around, and around and around, he is always going in circles.

“So,” says the Doctor, and grins, quick and sharp. “Steve. Where to?”

If he turns off the safeguards with a brush of his fingers, just this once, nobody has to know.

***

**_3\. Katniss Everdeen_ **

“What,” he snaps, “was that? What the _hell_ was that?”

She looks up to glare at him, cheeks flushed. She’s huddled on the TARDIS floor, knees tucked up against her chest and left hand worrying the end of her braid, but her eyes are bright and sharp and the set of her jaw is hard enough to cut diamond.

“You’re not making me go back out there,” she says, eyes flashing. “I’ll shoot you first.”

Her bow lies on the floor, inches out of her reach. The Doctor could grab for it, but he suspects that, if he tried, he’d have an arrow through each heart faster than he could blink, Time Lord reflexes or no. 

He looms, instead – he’s good at looming, he’s got the height for it, even if his arms are a bit gangly and always get in the way. And she doesn’t reach for her weapon, the one he should’ve known better than to let her bring on board, the one she looks so soft and lost and incomplete without.

She tucks her head down between her knees, and she is so _young_ , and the Doctor can feel his anger slide away, hot and indignant, out towards the battlefield, out through the TARDIS doors.

 “Well, yes,” sighs the Doctor, “I suppose you would.”

He snaps his fingers, and the doors shut tight, and the Doctor sinks down next to the girl on the floor.

 “Katniss,” he says, softly, brushing one hand over the top of her head. “Katniss, hey.”

He waits a moment, two. Outside the doors a war rages, fires bursting from the ground. Inside, there is silence, but the Doctor can hear the fighting anyway, hear the screams and the fires and the death, hear them in the beating of his hearts. Katniss shivers, just once, against his palm, and he knows she hears it too.

 “I’m done,” says Katniss, quiet. She shifts her head, just slightly, lifts her mouth away from her knees. “You hear me, Doctor? I’m done.”

The Doctor hears. He sighs. “Look,” he says, “Look. We – we don’t walk away. That’s not what we do. That’s not who we are. We do not walk away.”

Katniss huffs, loud and sharp, almost a laugh. The Doctor sighs, again.

“That was the deal,” he says, frustration bubbling under, flowing back in because there are people out there, and they are _dying,_ and they could be _stopping_ this, that’s what they’re here for. It always is. “That was the deal and you knew it. That was the deal you made when you came away with me. You don’t _get_ to walk away.”            

“Well, take me back, then!” snaps Katniss, and all of a sudden she has uncurled, uncoiled, her back straight and her chin up and her eyes blazing with barely banked fire. “I’m not fighting anyone else’s wars. And I’m not playing your games. I won’t be your – “ and she chokes it off, a word that could be _tribute_ or could be _soldier_ , she doesn’t say it, but the Doctor hears it anyway.

“I won’t be yours,” Katniss says, sharp and distinct and slow. “I’m _done_.”

She stands, then, a single fluid motion, rises to her feet and straightens out her shoulders and stalks behind the console, away from him and away from the doors. The Doctor watches and sees a retreat, but he has no right to judge her for it.

“Katniss,” he says, rising but not following, planting his hands on the console. He leans over, across, towards her, but the rotor’s between them and she’s looking away. “Those people – they _need_ you. They need _us_.”

“Well, I don’t _care_ ,” she says, and then her eyes are on his, sharp hunter’s eyes and a child’s fury and his own tiredness reflected back at him. “I’m done with fighting for justice or the – the _greater good_. All it’s done is lose me every single person I love.”

The Doctor watches her, the tension in her shoulders and the set of her jaw and the weight of the loss in her eyes. He takes one step, and another, clockwise, and folds her in his arms.

Katniss bites her lip, and shuts her eyes, and her shoulders sag.

“I was only ever fighting for them,” she says, into the Doctor’s shoulder. “What do I fight for now?”

“Yourself,” he tries, and he can taste the lie even as he says it.

Katniss laughs.

“I don’t even _like_ myself,” she says, and that is all, that is enough.

The Doctor shuts his eyes and presses a button and takes them away. 

***

**_4\. Harry Potter_ **

“You know,” Harry says, cradling his mug of tea between his palms, “the funny thing is, it’s all my fault.”

The Doctor’s hands twitch on the kettle. He doesn’t look up. “How do you figure?”

Harry takes a long drag of his tea, and the Doctor places the kettle down on the console. Fiddles with the controls. Harry’s wand’s doing curious things to the TARDIS’ circuitry, which really shouldn’t be possible with this kind of technology, but for all their advanced science the Time Lords never could get the hang of magic.

“You know me,” says Harry, eventually. “You know all about me. You know how they died.”

The Doctor pauses, drinks. The tea burns his tongue, and he adds another three sugar cubes.

“Yes,” he says, “I do.”

“Well then,” Harry says, and his eyes drop down, to the rim of the mug and through, down through the floor and into the dark. “You know they all died for me.”

The words hang in the silence of the TARDIS, and the air is warm, bright, glinting with a golden glow, but the light cannot take away their sting. Harry’s wand throws sparks onto the console where he left it, and the Doctor’s glasses hang from his pocket, and sometimes Harry can hear voices above the hum in the halls and he knows this ship is full of ghosts.

The Doctor sighs, a long exhausted breath, and when Harry looks back up the Doctor’s eyes are more tired than he’s ever seen them. There’s a frustration there, a banked angry knowledge, and the Doctor’s jaw throbs in a way that reminds Harry of days spent shivering in the Forest of Dean, of the walls of Hogwarts crumbling, of Fred and Tonks and Remus and Sirius and Dumbledore and Dobby and –

“Wars take lots of people, Harry,” the Doctor says, looking away. “Good people. Loving people. No one ever said the universe was kind.”

He glances back up at Harry and smiles, ragged and lopsided and comforting. He places a hand on Harry’s shoulder, and it’s warm and strong and shaking.

“You stopped it,” he says, gentle. “That’s all they could have asked of you.”

“But that doesn’t save them,” says Harry, leaning into the touch and closing his eyes. He can feel something, _something_ , pushing its way up inside of him, pressing against his eyelids and his throat and his chest. “Sure, I stopped it, alright, but they died so I could do it. They died, so I could save other people. But I couldn’t save them. That doesn’t save them,” and the pressure on his heart is unbearable.

“That doesn’t make them any less dead,” Harry says, and he’s startled by how angry he sounds, how angry he _is_ , all the rage and grief for all the family he never got to bury cracking its way through his voice.

 “No,” says the Doctor, very quiet. “No, it doesn’t.”

There’s a note in his voice, something rough and raw and hurting, the sound of memories being dragged over old battle scars. And here Harry thought he knew everything there was to know about war, here he thought he’d been given the battle by birthright, his whole world going up with it, his fight beginning before he’d ever learned to walk.  

But here is a man older than the world that burned, here is a man with the universe in a box and emptiness in his smile and war buried deep inside his bones, and all of a sudden Harry feels very small and very soft and very young.

“I’m too young,” whispers Harry, and he’d fought this, every time he’d heard it said, because they were wrong. He’d been ready. He’d been ready to grow up.

Now, here, it occurs to him that maybe he never had. That maybe going to war doesn’t make him a man. Maybe, maybe, all it makes him is tired.

“I’m too young for this,” Harry says, and his hands tighten around the mug until his knuckles turn white, until _I must not tell lies_ stands out clear as red ink on vellum. “I’m too young for it to be all my fault.”

The Doctor smiles again, quick and small and broken, and laughter crinkles the bitterness around his temples.

“Oh, Harry,” he says, “you’ll never be old enough.”  

***

**_5\. Martha Hudson_ **

Her eyes light up as they wander through the bazaar, and she runs her hands over alien fabrics like waterfalls in jewel hues and smiles warm and motherly at the stallholders and smacks the Doctor gently on the back of the head when he nearly takes someone’s eye out with his flailing. She tries everything and tastes everything and laughs, fearless and delighted, and when she comes across a high-collared black coat made of bulletproof spider-silk and a first-aid kit complete with laser scalpel and nano-gene capsules she buys them for her boys and looks, suddenly, exhausted.

“You know, dear,” she remarks, as the Doctor goes to bring her tea, “sometimes I think we live too long.”

He only ever takes her on one trip.

***

**_+1. Amelia Pond_ **

“Amelia.”

A little garden in Leadworth; late night, under stars. A blue box parked on the grass beside the shards of the ruined shed. A young old man in a bow tie and black boots, trembling fingers. A shrub, a bush, a tree. A light night breeze, blowing in from the east.

And Amelia Pond, beautiful Amelia, bobble-hatted and wellie-booted and asleep, draped over her child’s suitcase like a rag doll.

“Amelia,” whispers the Doctor, and sinks down to his knees.

The breeze doesn’t wake her, not this breeze, this gentle caressing wind. It kisses her apple cheeks and lifts fairy-strands of her copper hair up to dance; it brushes up against the small sleepy tears pooling behind her eyelids. But it does not wake her. And neither will he.

He’s here to tell her a story, he is, he promised. But he’ll be here later, a younger him, a younger lighter him who will pick her up and tuck her in and have her, and _have_ her, and have not lost her. And that him, that younger him with the days to come, he will tell her a story too. About the days that never came. And it will be a better story, because those are the days that are not gone yet.

“Oh, Pond,” the Doctor sighs. “I was wrong, you know.”

He settles down on the grass, sitting with his legs extended out before him, so close he can almost touch her. He reaches out a hand, fingertips skimming over her hair; she stirs, he retreats.

“I was wrong,” he says, and tucks the hand deep in a pocket, grips the fabric tight. “I thought – I thought you needed me,” and he smiles, wide and wet and heartbreaking, he smiles down at her. “Amelia Pond, all alone in her big old house. No one but her madman to keep her company. No one but me.”

His laugh is a broken thing, cracked and chiming into the night air.

“But I was wrong,” he whispers, and the wind catches his words away. “You never needed me. _I_ needed _you_.”

Beside him, softly, Amelia shifts, murmurs something to herself. Her voice, her sleepy child’s voice, soft and high and beautiful, so _beautiful_ , and inside his chest his hearts thud and stutter and break.

“I needed you,” says the Doctor. “I thought you needed me. To take you away from everyone you’d lost. To show you the stars.”

He sighs, just a breath, but it comes out like a sob. “But I needed you to see them. My Amelia.”

Above them, far above, the leaves rustle in the big oak tree. The air smells of cut grass and magic and rain, and the breeze picks up, wild and wet, and the sky is black like velvet.

And the stars – the stars.

The Doctor breathes, slowly, in and out.

“You see, Pond,” he says, “We were alone, you and I, eh? Both of us.” His smile is smaller now, dimmer, thoughtful. “But you, you had Rory. You had your family. Me, I only had you.”

He closes his eyes, just for a moment, listens to the wind blowing through the leaves. Listens to it howl in the dark, bite its way over pavement and roof and sky. Listens to their breathing, his and Amelia’s, listens to the quiet and the beat of their hearts.

And he can’t resist it, he can’t, he reaches out a hand and cups her cheek. She leans into his touch, skin soft and warm against his palm, and the Doctor smiles and tips his head back and looks up at the stars.

“Oh, my Amelia,” he whispers, and he thinks he can feel her smile up against his fingers.

“Don’t worry,” he says, to the stars that shine like they don’t know they’d gone missing, once upon a time. “You’ll get them all back.”  


End file.
